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Ohio consumer and environmental advocates are calling on state regulators to address disparities within FirstEnergy’s grid after a recent report found disadvantaged communities are more likely to rely on older, more outage-prone equipment.
Areas defined as disadvantaged under the Biden administration’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool were twice as likely to have low-voltage circuits compared to other parts of FirstEnergy’s Ohio territory, according to the study by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Equipment was also generally older and had less capacity for normal and overload situations.
The results reflect historical patterns of underinvestment in disadvantaged communities, the report says, but the full scope of the problem — including across Ohio’s other utilities — is unclear due to the lack of information from utilities and regulators.
“The public availability of any utility data is very, very limited in Ohio,” said report author Shay Banton, a regulatory program engineer and energy justice policy advocate for the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.
The Ohio Environmental Council submitted the report as part of FirstEnergy’s pending rate case before the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and is asking regulators to address the topic in an evidentiary hearing set for May 5.
The state of the local grid matters when it comes to the reliability of customers’ electric service, their ability to add distributed renewable energy resources like rooftop solar, and a community’s potential to attract business investments that could improve its economic conditions.
Regulated electric utilities file reliability reports each spring that focus on two commonly used metrics. The system average interruption frequency index, or SAIFI, shows how many outages occurred per customer. The customer average interruption duration index, or CAIDI, measures the average length of time for restoring service to customers who lose power.
The annual reports also list factors involved in outages, with breakouts for transmission-related service problems and major events. Major events such as severe weather are considered statistical outliers that don’t count for calculating whether utilities meet their company-specific standards for CAIDI and SAIFI.
While weather accounted for the majority of time Ohioans went without power last year, equipment failures also triggered thousands of outages. For the ninth year in a row, at least one Ohio utility company failed to meet reliability standards, reports filed this month show. Both AEP Ohio and FirstEnergy’s Toledo Edison missed their marks for the average time before power is restored for customers who experience outages.
The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio also collects data on the worst-performing circuits. Individual circuits serve anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand customers. However, the state doesn’t post these reports online or disclose the circuit’s exact locations, which could be used to show whether they are concentrated in disadvantaged communities.
The SAIFI and CAIDI metrics used by state regulators did not show significant disparities between disadvantaged neighborhoods and other areas in FirstEnergy’s territory. But Banton said those reliability metrics rely on averages for large groups, which can obscure disparities. They said that utilities should also be required to publicly report the number of customers experiencing frequent service interruptions and the number of customers who faced long outages.
Utilities in Ohio tend to be reactive in dealing with circuit problems, Banton said. Communities can face longer outages if utilities wait for equipment to fail before replacing it. Instead, Banton wants utilities’ capital investments to address current disparities and then prevent them from recurring in the future.
“The bottom line is that consumers should get reliable service, and utilities are obligated to provide reliable service,” said Merrilee Embs, a spokesperson for the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, which did not work on the report. The group is concerned about whether utilities’ capital improvement spending directly benefits customers — an issue that relates to grid disparities.
“FirstEnergy’s (and other Ohio utilities’) failure to implement grid modernization plans in a way that benefits residential consumers likely contributes to grid disparities such as those described in the [study],” Embs wrote via email after reviewing the report.
FirstEnergy has challenged the Ohio Environmental Council’s objections about grid disparities in its rate case. Meanwhile, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio is due to consider revisions to the annual reliability reporting requirements by Sept. 30, 2026. The commission will likely start accepting comments on the rules later this year, said spokesperson Matt Schilling.
The quality of a neighborhood’s grid influences more than whether residents’ lights stay on.
“These inequities can have serious consequences for customer access to distributed energy resources, which can save money,” said Karin Nordstrom, a lawyer for the Ohio Environmental Council.
Rooftop solar or other distributed clean energy can add to traffic on local grid circuits, posing a challenge for equipment that’s older or has lower voltages or capacity. Those circuits generally can handle less grid traffic, Banton said. In contrast, newer, high-voltage circuits tend to have “less bumps and less potholes [along with] better on-ramps.”
The grid’s quality and capacity also impact an area’s economic development. Historically, utilities have focused capital investment on places where people are moving or where they expect new industrial demand. That approach exacerbates inequity, Banton said. Even if businesses otherwise wanted to move to disadvantaged areas, poor electrical infrastructure may lead them to go elsewhere to avoid huge costs for upgrading the local grid, they said.
“The energy transition is in full effect, but many of the communities that suffer first and worst from climate change are not able to make the transition due to underinvestment in infrastructure,” said Tony Reames, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, who did not work on the new report. He served at the U.S. Department of Energy as deputy director for energy justice and principal deputy director for state and community energy programs during the Biden administration.
Because utilities have failed to invest in and maintain the grid evenly throughout their service territories, an equity-based approach to infrastructure modernization should make sure resources now go to areas that were left behind, Reames said.
He supports the report’s call for more granular data, including details on customers with repeated or prolonged outages. The report also calls on utilities to publish maps showing grid capacity, and information about which census tracts are served by each circuit and substation transformers.
“I often say, ‘The data you don’t have is the problem you don’t see,’” Reames noted. “Difficulties accessing data or the lack of certain data availability are sometimes a result of entities not wanting to confirm issues that are anecdotally known.”
The “Eating the Earth” column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.
NEW YORK — Our food system generates one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions, and the human race has made almost no progress reducing them. Except in New York City’s public hospitals.
Before the city deployed an innovative new strategy two years ago to shrink its “carbon foodprint,” 99% of its patient meals included meat. Now more than half are vegetarian, generating 36% fewer emissions. While vegan activists have mostly failed to get us to ditch meat through education campaigns and yelling, and biotech entrepreneurs have mostly failed to convert us to plant-based substitutes designed to mimic meat, bureaucrats working for embattled Mayor Eric Adams have engineered a radical dietary shift.
Sitting in her bed in the surgical ward at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital, pointing at a clean plate that minutes earlier was covered with mushroom stroganoff, 60-year-old Pamela Sumlin-Gambil revealed the secret of the city’s success.
“I normally take what they offer me, you know?” she said with a shrug.
That’s the strategy. Food service associates in the city’s 11 public hospitals are trained to tell patients the chef recommends the sweet potato burrito, the red curry vegetable stew, or another plant-based meal. If the patient doesn’t bite, the associate offers a three-bean chili, a black-eyed pea casserole, or another meatless dish. If the patient says no twice, then the associate suggests a meat option. But 51% of patients don’t say no twice.
In behavioral science, this kind of nudge is known as making the preferred option the “default,” and it’s a weirdly powerful hack. When employees are automatically defaulted into a 401(k) plan, they tend to stay in it and save more for retirement; when consumers buy new TVs with a low-power default setting, they tend to leave them that way and use less power. We’re an inertial species, predisposed to accept the status quo, so “choice architecture” really matters. As Sumlin-Gambil said, we normally take what’s offered to us — and when what’s offered is better for the climate, we inadvertently reduce our impact on the planet.
The one caveat with food is that we stop taking what’s offered to us when we don’t enjoy it. That’s why New York has paired its default strategy with a conscious effort to serve delicious, nutritious, and culturally resonant plant-based meals with clean ingredient lists. And it’s working; the food service giant Sodexo, which has now served the city’s patients more than 2 million plant-based meals, reports a 98% satisfaction rate. The average vegetarian meal costs 59 cents less than meat, so the program has also saved the city more than $1 million.
In fact, the program has worked so well that Sodexo plans to expand plant-based defaults to all 400 U.S. hospitals it serves. At a time when humans already use one-third of the earth’s habitable land to raise livestock, and we’re expected to eat 50% more meat by 2050, the New York hospital experience offers hope that vegetarian defaults at universities, corporate cafeterias, and other institutional settings could help us eat less. Officials from Canada, Denmark, Germany, the U.K., and several other countries have already visited to learn how they could reduce their food emissions through defaults of their own.
“What’s so exciting is the way this retains freedom of choice. Nobody’s forced to go vegan,” said Katie Cantrell, cofounder and CEO of Greener by Default, a nonprofit that has advised New York City and Sodexo on their behavioral approach. “The idea is to make the sustainable choice the path of least resistance, without getting into the big political and cultural fights.”
Feeding the world without frying it will be one of the 21st century’s most daunting challenges. We’ll have to eat less meat, waste less food, stop clearing wilderness for new farmland, and make more food on existing farmland. I’ve written Canary columns about several promising solutions — fake meat, more efficient ranches, a super-tree called pongamia — and a bunch more appear in my upcoming book about our eating of the earth. But none of those solutions are really moving the needle yet, which is why we’re currently on track to deforest another dozen Californias worth of land by 2050.
Offering black bean enchiladas to hospital patients actually does seem to move the needle.
These days, Mayor Adams is best known as the trash-talking rogue who quit the Democratic Party after the Trump administration made his corruption charges disappear. But his main claim to fame used to be his plant-based diet, which he credited with helping him lose 35 pounds and cure his diabetes in a book titled “Healthy at Last.” Even his veganism has attracted media skepticism — he confessed to occasional lapses after reporters caught him eating fish — but he’s been a consistent advocate for plant-based eating, and his administration has pushed more plant-based protein into the city’s schools, jails, and homeless shelters.
The hospital initiative is the centerpiece of New York’s efforts to reduce meat-eating, and Kate MacKenzie, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, says the default strategy is the key to driving change without provoking backlash. Most people like meat. They don’t want to be told to give it up to save the earth or even their health. But they’re not necessarily committed to eating it all the time, either. They’ll try what’s offered, if it sounds good, especially when they’re confined to a hospital bed.
“It’s not plant-based or bust. It’s not giving the food a label, so people say it’s not for them because they’re not that,” MacKenzie said. “We nudge you towards choices that are better for you and the planet, but if you really want meat, you can still get it.”
When Sodexo Chef Phil DeMaiolo created the recipes for the city’s plant-based hospital meals, his top priorities were to make them tasty and reminiscent of home, because patients who don’t eat don’t get well. The dishes are prepared in a central “culinary center” in Brooklyn with culture and demographics in mind — a stew called sancocho in Latin neighborhoods, featuring root vegetables instead of chicken or pork; red curry tofu for Indian communities; a penne pesto like the ones he ate as an Italian-American kid in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Asian patients didn’t love a pad thai without fish sauce, so DeMaiolo yanked it off the menu.
He doesn’t serve Impossible or Beyond burgers — not because he thinks there’s anything wrong with fake meat, just because he wants to serve more natural and recognizable vegetarian dishes.
“It’s gotta be authentic, and it’s gotta have flavor — not ‘hospital food,’ just good food,” DeMaiolo said. “Then you gotta advertise it right, and do some education.”
There’s behavioral science behind the advertising, too; studies show that calling dishes “vegan” or “vegetarian” is a turnoff to omnivores, while adjectives like “zesty” or “hearty” are much more enticing than “healthy” or “sustainable.” Even though plant-based meals are almost always better for the climate than chicken or pork, and dramatically better than beef or lamb, describing their climate benefits is apparently counterproductive. Most people prefer to associate food with comfort, joy, and their grandmother’s kitchen, not the boiling of the planet. In general, it helps to focus on the appeal of the meals, rather than their lack of meat; people want to feel like they’re getting something, not being denied something.
DeMaiolo says the education component is even more important to the program’s success. He began by taking field trips to all 11 hospitals, providing samples to CEOs, doctors, nurses, and janitors, getting their input as well as their buy-in. Then the real education is done by trained food service associates who not only recommend plant-based options to the patients but let them know about the nutritional benefits of each dish and eventually send them home with green and healthy recipes they can cook themselves.
At Kings County Hospital, a nearly 200-year-old institution in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, a Moroccan-born food service associate named Hassan Ouhassi took his iPad to Sumlin-Gambil’s bed to make sure she had liked her mushroom stroganoff. She had; she said it tasted just like beef. He agreed; he tries every dish himself.
“I tell them it’s healthy food, I tell them they’ll like it, and they do!” Ouhassi said. “They clean their plates. Sometimes they ask for meat, which is fine. Not usually, though.”
This is the power of defaults: We’re much more likely to register to vote, sign up to be an organ donor, or renew our Netflix subscription when we have to opt out rather than opt in. Changing behaviors is hard, and we’ll have to change quite a few to maintain a habitable planet, so New York’s nudges could be a powerful model.
Mayor Adams embarked on his plant-based journey for health reasons, after he went nearly blind in one eye and his doctors told him he’d need diabetes drugs the rest of his life, so hospitals were the perfect venue to try to deploy his plant-based vision. But his food policy team is just as focused on climate. It’s set a goal of reducing the city’s food-related emissions by one-third by 2030, and shifting from meat to plants is the best way to do that. The team is expanding plant-based meals in schools and other city-run institutions while securing commitments from private institutions like Columbia University, the Bronx Zoo, and The Rockefeller Foundation to reduce their own food-related emissions by one-fourth.
MacKenzie, the director of the food policy office, says her strategy is simple: Buy less beef, offer more plants, focus on taste, and don’t guilt anyone. The city government’s emissions from food purchases are down 29%. That’s quite an achievement, because global food emissions are rising fast, mainly because global meat consumption rises just about every year.
To meet the 2050 emissions targets in the Paris climate accord, consumers in rich countries will have to reduce their consumption of meat, especially ruminant meats like beef and lamb, by about half. The problem is, our ancestors began eating meat 2 million years ago, and it literally helped make us who we are; we evolved bigger brains to help us find meat, and smaller stomachs because we didn’t need to digest as many plants. Animal flesh will be an extremely hard habit to break, which is why the default strategy that relies on our mindless willingness to outsource our dietary choices holds such promise.
“People are overwhelmed, there’s a cacophony of information thrown at them, they’ve got too many decisions to make — sometimes they just want to be told what to do,” said Eve Turow-Paul, executive director of the nonprofit Food for Climate League, which helped design the messaging for the default program. “If you can make the good choice the easy choice, without getting into the political bickering of ‘you’re taking away my burger,’ you can help people and the planet.”
The animal rights movement has tried to turn Americans against meat by exposing the cruelty of factory farms, throwing blood at models wearing fur, and holding a lot of noisy demonstrations. Biotech startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have tried to stop the expansion of animal agriculture by offering meat substitutes that tasted, smelled, and seared like the real thing. But if anything, Americans are even more committed to eating animals, as “meatfluencers” get rich on the internet and “carnivore diets” trend on Instagram.
There are plenty of exciting potential food and climate solutions, but none of them are reducing many emissions yet. My family no longer wastes food at home, because we’ve got a food waste dehydrator that converts our kitchen scraps into chicken feed, but less than 0.1% of American households have one. Pongamia trees produce more food than soybean plants on much worse land, but so far they’ve only been planted on about 0.01% of American farmland.
But plant-based defaults seem easy to implement, easy to scale, and remarkably effective. And unlike Meatless Mondays or plastic-straw bans, they don’t seem to induce defensiveness or hostility.
“We’re living in such depressing and polarizing times,” said Cantrell, the Greener by Default cofounder. “Well, this is something uncontroversial that actually works!”
Nearly 3 million Massachusetts households will have the chance to start saving money on heating next winter under new seasonal heat-pump rates from the state’s three major electric utilities.
Regulators have approved plans from Unitil and National Grid to reduce electricity rates for heat pump owners during the region’s often-frigid winter months, and Eversource is preparing its own proposal. Together, the three utilities provide service to about 86% of Massachusetts’ households.
The goal of the rates is to accelerate adoption of heat pumps by making it cheaper to run these super-efficient, low-carbon appliances in a region where the economics of switching from fossil-fueled heating don’t always pencil out for homeowners.
“The end result, all over Massachusetts, is that this will change the numbers. It will encourage heat pump adoption,” said Larry Chretien, executive director of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance. “Then the question will be: What do we do for an encore?”
Utility regulators are already looking into that question, opening an investigation in March to determine how to make future iterations of seasonal heat-pump rates as effective as possible.
Expanding the use of heat pumps is a major part of Massachusetts’ strategy for reaching its ambitious goal of going carbon-neutral by 2050. Today, nearly 80% of the state’s homes burn fossil fuels — natural gas, heating oil, or propane — for heat. Many of the remaining homes use inefficient electric resistance heating.
The state’s climate plan calls for installing 500,000 heat pumps by 2030 to tackle emissions associated with building operations. Air-source heat pumps, the most common version of the appliance, use electricity to extract thermal energy from the surrounding air to heat and cool homes. The only greenhouse gas emissions associated with the systems are those that come from generating the electricity used.
The persistently high cost of electricity in Massachusetts — only three states had higher residential prices in January — is an obstacle for many homeowners interested in heat pumps. The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources has expressed skepticism that the state can reach its heat pump goals without changes to current rates.
Most households now using oil, propane, or electric resistance heating would likely save money by using heat pumps, regardless of electric rates. But for many consumers using relatively cheap natural gas, the added electricity use from switching to heat pumps would drive their total costs up. That’s where seasonal heat-pump rates come into play, charging lower prices to homes using heat pumps so the added power consumption doesn’t translate into higher total energy bills.
Unitil was the first of Massachusetts’ three main investor-owned electric utilities to put forth a seasonal heat-pump rate, receiving regulatory approval in June for a discount of 7 cents per kilowatt-hour — 64% below the summer rate. Regulators then ordered National Grid to do the same; that proposal was approved in February. In the state Department of Public Utilities’ order launching the investigation into heat pump rates, regulators required Eversource to submit its own such plan by May 15 and committed to moving the proposal through the regulatory process quickly enough to make a new rate effective for the coming winter.
These lower rates are possible because utilities are essentially overcharging heat pump customers for their winter electricity use under the current system, said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
On each utility bill, customers pay, of course, for the electricity they use. They also pay a delivery charge that funds the construction and maintainence of a grid that can accommodate moments of peak demand: those few hot summer evenings when dishwashers, televisions, and millions of air conditioners are running at the same time.
In the winter, though, average demand is much lower, so the strain on the grid is much lighter. During these months, the delivery charge doesn’t properly reflect the actual costs of keeping the grid running, said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for clean energy nonprofit Acadia Center.
Households that operate heat pumps in the winter are “not actually putting much stress on the system at all,” he said. “They really shouldn’t have to pay as much as they are.”
A collaboration of state agencies, known as the Interagency Rates Working Group, modeled several possible rate designs and found that a 5-cent winter discount, compared to the existing rate, could slightly increase overall costs for a household switching from natural gas. A discount of 18 cents, however, would result in significant savings across the board: A house switching from natural gas could save up to $78 per month, and a home making the move from electric resistance heat could save more than $500 per month.
Though more numbers need to be crunched, energy advocates are inclined to support a deeper discount. Because of the high cost of electricity in Massachusetts, a larger rate reduction might be needed to make a heat pump a competitive choice, they said.
“You do need a pretty significant discount in some states to ensure that a heat pump is lower-cost than a gas furnace going forward,” Kresowik said.
As part of the investigation into seasonal heat-pump rate design, regulators have asked the public to submit comments by June 2. The approach to gathering feedback is a welcome departure from the usual process, Chretien said.
In most cases before utility regulators, outside organizations can only participate if they become formal intervenors and have a lawyer representing them. It is expensive, time-consuming, and beyond the reach of many advocacy groups and most individuals, Chretien said. The request for comments from any interested parties opens up the proceedings, he said, allowing anyone with a stake in climate or energy affordability issues to participate.
“The [Department of Public Utilities] is recognizing that their normal intervention process is onerous,” Chretien said. “To me, it’s good government to do it this way.”
For this approach to make a real impact, however, regulators must have a plan for reaching out to all communities, not just the narrow slice of people who are aware of public utilities regulations and issues, said Charles Hua, founder of consumer education nonprofit PowerLines. It will be important to connect with groups of different income and education levels, to ensure everyone has a voice.
“I would not expect in a vacuum that there would be awareness,” Hua said. “I suspect they need to proactively engage communities.”
ENFIELD, N.C. — When history buffs reenacted a Revolutionary War general’s visit to this tiny, rural North Carolina town in February, its top elected official was notably absent.
General Marquis de Lafayette may have helped liberate America from England, but over 240 years later his story has little relevance to Mayor Mondale Robinson.
“I find it extremely hard to be celebrating the Revolutionary War when people in Enfield — households of four people — are living on $24,000 a year,” said Robinson, sitting in his windowless office, sparsely decorated with small, framed photos of Black leaders. “I don’t know what freedom looks like, because you can’t tell me people in Enfield are free to live the way they want to.”
Robinson, who was elected in 2022, envisions a day when Black people in his community are able to live a life of pride, freedom, and economic stability. He believes clean energy will play a central role.
Alongside other community leaders and clean energy advocates, Robinson is planning a new solar farm that could meet most of Enfield’s electricity needs. He wants a modern substation to replace the town’s dilapidated one. And he aims to create a “storefront” for energy efficiency that could help residents reduce energy waste and their electric bills.
“We’re trying to be energy independent,” Robinson said. “Besides green energy being good for the environment, it’s also going to help our people … live a life with dignity. That includes the housing, the grid, figuring out how to do renewable energy in a way that is not just sustainable but also job-creating.”
Some formidable barriers stand in the way, from the Trump administration’s antipathy to clean energy and communities of color, to pockets of local opposition to the large solar farms that have become common across the region. But with money still flowing for now from Biden-era climate laws — which were intended to fund progress in historically disadvantaged communities like Enfield — Robinson and his fellow visionaries say their aspirations are within reach.
“[It’s] a place that has more than 260 sunny days per year on average,” said Robinson. “I’m super excited about what’s possible.”
In many ways, Enfield typifies eastern North Carolina and the rural South. Once a trading post for peanuts, tobacco, and other crops, the town’s commercial district, five miles east of Interstate 95, now stands nearly empty. Like much of the state, the town faces increasingly frequent natural disasters, like hurricanes. It’s devastatingly poor and overwhelmingly Black, home to many descendants of those who remained enslaved long after Lafayette’s victory tour.
Robinson grew up in Black Bottom, Enfield’s historically Black section. The neighborhood still has no sidewalks, and he says indoor plumbing wasn’t a given here until the 1990s. On a walk through town, he pointed out the shotgun home he lived in for a time as a child with his parents and some of his 12 siblings.
“I’m 45 years old,” he said. “I should not know what an outhouse is.”
When Robinson looks back on his childhood, he sees clearly how the lack of infrastructure and the quality of the environment impacted the health of those around him. Many of his schoolmates had ringworm, a result, he thinks, of poor sewer systems, water contamination upstream, or a combination of the two. Severe asthma, which can be triggered by air pollution, kept one brother in the hospital for most of 4th grade.
Dumpster diving for glass bottles and other recyclables as a teenager, Robinson found a copy of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.” He must have read it four times cover to cover. The seminal essay collection helped Robinson draw the line between systemic racism and Black public health.
“My people suffer the most,” Robinson said. When America sneezes, he said, “Black people get a flu.”
In 1997, Robinson left “the bleak reality of Enfield” for a stint in the Marine Corps, then Livingstone College, a historically Black university in Salisbury, North Carolina. After graduating, he ran dozens of progressive political campaigns around the country and the world, from Illinois to the Congo.
In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, Robinson founded the Black Male Voter Project — aimed at communicating year-round, on- and off-season, with a demographic often taken for granted by the Democratic establishment.
“I wanted to do something for the brothers,” he said. “Maslow would say they would be on the bottom rung,” referencing the late American psychologist who conceptualized a hierarchy of needs to explain what motivates human behavior. “They don’t have their basic needs met.”
A constellation of political projects still occupies him. But he returned to North Carolina to run for mayor because he felt like a “fraud” for not organizing his people back home.
One of his first official acts: livestreaming the removal of a prominent Confederate monument in town. Any headwinds he’s facing over his clean energy vision are akin to the blowback he’s still experiencing over that day in 2022, Robinson said.
“I’m getting pushback because I’m loud, and I’m a Black man, and I should know my place.”
About 30 miles south of the Virginia border, in Halifax County, Enfield is in a part of the state largely untouched by Duke Energy’s grid and its monopoly. The town owns its electric utility, a holdover from when private electric providers couldn’t foresee profiting from serving far-flung hamlets of 2,000 people. Much of the area connects to a regional transmission organization called PJM Interconnection, in which wholesale electricity has long been bought and sold on a competitive market. That means independent power producers can enlist customers besides Duke, and they’ve already built scores of solar farms in the area, demonstrating the economic viability of the resource.
Those factors drew William Munn, regional director of the Carolinas for advocacy group Vote Solar, to Enfield.
“In late 2023, we were looking for communities to share the great news around the Inflation Reduction Act,” Munn said, referring to the 2022 climate spending law that includes incentives for historically disadvantaged towns.
The fact that the town owned its own utility was especially enticing. “If you have the political will,” Munn said, “you can do whatever you want, and that’s rare in this regulatory environment.”
The town’s atrocious energy burden is generating a lot of that will. Despite having small homes and even smaller incomes, Enfield households have average winter electric bills of $650 a month, according to the town finance director. That’s in part because much of the housing stock is old, poorly insulated, and inefficient.
“These are [800- to 1,200-square-foot] homes that have bills this high. These aren’t big homes,” said Reggie Bynum, Southeast community outreach director at the nonprofit Center for Energy Education, based up the road in Roanoke Rapids. “It’s old wiring; it’s old insulation. Weatherization needs are definitely there. These aren’t modern homes.”
Higher-than-average rates compound the problem. The town buys electricity from Halifax Electric Membership Corp., which in turn buys from the statewide association of electric cooperatives. The association owns some generating facilities but also buys wholesale power through PJM and from investor-owned utilities like Duke. In Raleigh, one of the wealthiest areas in the state, Duke charges 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Enfield, one of the poorest, the rate approaches 14 cents.
“We’re selling our residents electricity that’s third-time bought and sold,” Robinson said.
A three- to five-megawatt solar farm on about 20 acres of land, backed up by a battery with a duration of four hours or more, could supply all of the town’s 1,200 electric meters, most of them residential. The move would likely cut rates, especially if government grants covered all or part of the approximately $10 million solar array and backup battery. All told, experts believe the generation system could pay for itself in about 15 years.
The town would remain connected to the surrounding grid during emergencies, Munn said, “but the most important part is that for 95% of the time, they are going to be drawing on their own battery bank and solar generation, and that’s going to stabilize the cost for the long term.”
Replacing the town’s dilapidated substation, which requires frequent repairs, is also a priority. Its wooden poles were erected in the middle of the last century, and its power lines have limited capacity — not enough to receive and transfer power from a five-megawatt solar farm, advocates say.
Six of the substation’s seven lines are at 2,400 volts, said Nick Jimenez, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “It’s so low that they don’t make equipment to fix that anymore.”
“It’s like having an antique car,” Robinson said. “Waiting on parts.”
Replacing the substation’s wooden frame with a metal one and swapping out the 2,400-volt feeder lines for 7,200-volt versions would bring Enfield into the 21st century for a price tag of about $5 million.
Across the train tracks from the rundown substation are the town fairgrounds, a playing field, a basketball court, and a small windowless building labeled “Enfield Parks and Recreation.” Here, the next piece of the clean energy vision is beginning to take shape.
“The town had for a long time been considering building a community center,” Munn said. “We came to them and said, ‘How about you make that community center a resilience center? Let’s dream big.’”
Called the Enfield Energy Center, the structure would replace the concrete parks building and a few others on the site. It would be powered by rooftop solar panels and battery storage, serving as a gathering place during emergencies. A commercial kitchen would help incubate food businesses and supply healthy meals during disasters. And an on-site community garden would provide food and educational opportunities.
“When people see, feel, and touch solar and renewable energy, and see that it works,” Munn said, “see it constructed in a beautiful space, then it gets demystified.”
Around the corner from the future resilience center, on the town’s main commercial strip, sits a boarded-up, three-bedroom home. Built in 1925, the house is advertised on Zillow as a “classic fixer-upper.” Robinson, who earns a pittance as mayor but has other income from his political consulting work, bought it earlier this year for $32,500, per Zillow.
The plan is to transform the nearly 1,800-square-foot home into a Weatherization Hub. Like the Enfield Energy Center, the building would be topped with solar panels backed up with battery storage. There, staff could hold do-it-yourself weatherization workshops and help residents apply for free energy-efficiency improvements, potentially including from Energy Saver NC, the state’s recently launched rebate program for new appliances, weather stripping, and other upgrades.
“It may take a while for that concept house to be built,” said Bynum, who’s spearheading the weatherization project. “Energy Saver is good if it’s still around, but I think there’s life in that house after that to do other things. We will be able to have weatherization training there. We’d be able to have weatherization supplies for people.”
Since last fall, Robinson, together with advocates and organizers like Munn, Jimenez, and Bynum, has been holding town meetings to lay out their vision and get feedback and buy-in. “I always like to overshare with my people,” Robinson said.
Dozens of residents attend the monthly gathering, and most have been supportive. “It’s quirky to them,” Robinson admitted. “But once they understand that with solar, we can lock in our rates for 30, 40 years — that, to them, is rewarding, and it brings them into the conversation.”
He recognizes that clean energy is not top of mind for most of Enfield’s residents. “I don’t get upset when my people are talking trash about me [for] talking so much about green energy, because I know that they’re literally just surviving,” he said.
For Munn of Vote Solar, energy independence is a key part of survival. “Once you’re able to control your own destiny, you essentially control your own quality of life,” he said, “and that’s something that has been elusive in communities of color throughout the Black Belt.”
The concept of personal control over private property helped solar advocates notch a win earlier this year. Halifax County had placed a temporary pause on new solar farms in October after pushback from some residents. As the expiration date for the moratorium neared, officials were weighing a new ordinance that would require a mile between each new project.
The result would be an economic “dead zone” where panels might have otherwise gone, said Enfield Commissioner Kenneth Ward and others at a public hearing in February. The buffer would dash the town’s plans for self-generation.
“Responsible solar development can bring jobs, lower energy costs, and strengthen our local economy without harming local agriculture at all,” Ward said, responding at the hearing to misinformation about the impact of renewables on farming.
The one-mile limitation would also harm private landowners who rely on lease income from solar developers, several speakers at the hearing said.
“I think that really carried the day,” said Munn. “It showed folk [that] Enfield had a vision, had intention, and had allies.”
In the end, county commissioners voted four to one to reject the one-mile buffer and allow the moratorium to expire.
Money remains the biggest barrier to carrying out these ambitious plans. One of the poorest towns in the nation, with an annual budget of around $6 million, Enfield and its residents can’t float the up-front cost of its clean energy projects, even though they may ultimately pay for themselves in the form of lower utility bills.
That’s part of why town leaders decided to formally retain the Southern Environmental Law Center to help access government grants intended for communities exactly like theirs. Despite blows from the Trump administration’s funding freeze and continued mass layoffs at the agencies responsible for distributing funds, three big pots of money created during the Biden administration still appear available.
First, there’s the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, set up and administered by the U.S. Department of Energy as required by the 2021 infrastructure law. Last October, officials announced a funding opportunity of $400 million for “energy improvements in rural or remote areas.” A not-yet-scrubbed government webpage explains that the program “gives communities with 10,000 or fewer people the tools and resources they need to improve the resilience, reliability, and affordability of their local energy systems.”
Another outgrowth of the infrastructure law is a federally funded state program for grid resilience and improvement that is distributing $9.2 million annually over five years.
Both programs, Enfield advocates say, appear custom-made to enable the town’s clean energy blueprint.
“We’re very, very confident that we are going to be able to convince folks to give us money and get this built,” Munn said. “I don’t know that there’s any community in the Black Belt who is trying to get this done. If you can do it in the Black Belt in North Carolina, in the South, I think it shows [it can be done] anywhere.”
The large solar farm could be built with help from the Solar for All initiative, created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. While the resulting $156 million state program is largely intended to help low-income households purchase rooftop panels, it can also be tapped to support “community solar pilot programs, many with municipal utilities and electric co-ops, which will lower energy costs for participating households,” according to the program’s website.
Though early Trump edicts froze Solar for All funds, they began flowing again early last month.
However, the White House has made clear its animus to clean energy and to any effort to right a history of systemic wrongs against Black Americans. Press reports say the Trump administration is moving to eliminate the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations entirely. So, while these funding sources appear safe for now, nothing is guaranteed.
“Elections have consequences,” Munn said. “We recognize that. Big fossil-fuel interests helped Donald Trump get elected, and now we are at the crossroads of where we want to be as a society.”
If these federal and state funds don’t pan out, there are “B and C” plans afoot, Jimenez said, mostly in the form of enlisting private donations. “The plan is to keep forging ahead regardless,” he said.
Robinson, for his part, will also keep forging. The mayoral job takes an emotional toll, he said, and he had waffled about whether to run for another term this fall. He ultimately decided to go for it. “I’m determined to do this work. I’m passionate about it,” he said. “I am convinced I have more work to do with my town.”
He used an urban-planning metaphor to explain how he sees his role. “They talk about skylarks and moles,” he said. “Skylarks are the people with the vision. But the moles are the ones that get it done. At this moment, I feel like I’m a sky-mole.”
“Hopefully it won’t be that long until people say, ‘Here, we got this, step aside.’ That’s what I’m excited about.”
A clarification was made on April 15, 2025: The caption for the first image in this story originally implied that the building behind Robinson is Enfield’s town hall. The caption has been changed to better reflect his location in the image.
California, for all its talk of clean energy and climate leadership, has long depended on fossil gas to keep its lights on. A decade ago, gas provided around 60% of the state’s electricity production. But this long-running dominance may be coming to an end.
California’s solar systems, from rooftop panels to massive desert installations, generated nearly as much electricity as its gas plants last year, according to data pulled from think tank Ember’s U.S. Electricity Data Explorer. Gas’ market share has declined gradually since its 2012 high, while solar’s shot up steadily — last year, the two nearly intersected. This year could be the first time that solar takes the lead.
Solar far outpaces all other electricity sources in new power plant construction, not just in California but in Texas and the nation as a whole. But that metric is measured in megawatts of production capacity — it doesn’t tell us how much electricity solar panels actually make in the course of a year. Solar produces only when the sun shines, so it needs more megawatts of nameplate generating capacity to rival sources like gas or nuclear that can operate around the clock.
That’s why this chart is so striking: It displays actual electricity production in California throughout 2024. Solar really produced more than 30% of the state’s electricity, while gas fell closer to that percentage than it has ever been in the modern era.
This inflection point represents the culmination of yearslong trends. Gas surged to a record level in 2012, when the San Onofre nuclear plant ceased pumping out carbon-free baseload power. But new gas plant construction in the state has effectively stopped, and the rapidly expanding battery fleet is now competing for the most valuable peak hours. Gigawatts of batteries now cut into gas plants’ run-time, as can be seen on hot summer nights and mild shoulder months alike.
Over the last decade, it’s worth noting, generation from nuclear, wind, and geothermal has stayed flat, and hydropower fluctuated with the annual weather patterns. Those carbon-free sources all have their own passionate advocates and deeply researched reports from the Department of Energy on how they can break out of stasis and grow again. But solar is the only one of the bunch consistently increasing production year over year.
That’s not guaranteed to always be the case. The Republican-led Congress still could axe federal tax credits that currently support renewable installations for the next decade. California has also gotten in its own way, as when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s handpicked utility regulators chose to dismantle the prevailing rules for rooftop solar, greatly diminishing the pace of residential installations.
Nonetheless, if gas power production continues its downward plunge, California will eventually have to figure some things out. Specifically, it needs other tools to ensure on-demand power through the nights and weather patterns that dampen solar production.
State grid planners have ordered utilities to start procuring long-duration energy storage, a category of technologies promising to deliver steady clean power for far longer than lithium-ion batteries can manage at today’s price points. The state is also taking early steps to open up its coastline for offshore wind development; the deep Pacific seabed calls for floating turbines, a newer technology that has not yet been built in the U.S. Efforts to better connect the western grid could also make it easier to balance supply and demand across the region.
California, whose state economy would rank fifth among the world’s nations, is not a place that can change course in an instant. But this impending unseating of gas power by solar shows what can happen over a decade of dedicated policy, regulatory, and business efforts to push down carbon emissions and accelerate clean energy. It took time to get to this point, but now the results are undeniable.
The Trump administration is threatening to force U.S. grid operators and utilities to keep money-losing coal-fired power plants running, no matter how dirty and expensive their power is.
Its stated reason? To shore up the reliability of the U.S. power grid.
It’s the latest salvo in a long-running battle over the country’s increasingly brittle grid — one that pits those in favor of hanging on to fossil fuels, and particularly coal, against those who put their faith in a future powered by cleaner and cheaper alternatives.
That battle is entering a critical phase as the grid faces challenges on multiple fronts.
Ever more intense summer heat waves and winter cold snaps driven by climate change are already straining the grid. An unprecedented boom in electricity demand, spurred by AI data centers and a resurgent manufacturing sector, threatens to push the grid even closer to its limit. Meanwhile, aging and unprofitable coal power plants have been closing at a rapid clip — and grid backlogs are preventing new solar, wind, batteries, and even fossil-gas plants from being built fast enough to replace them.
If these imbalances persist, more than half of North America faces significant risk of energy shortages over the next five to 10 years, according to a 2024 report from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which oversees the nation’s electric system. Utilities and regional grid operators are sounding the same alarm. Many say they need to build more fossil gas–fired power plants and keep costly coal plants open to deal with what is evolving into a genuine crisis.
But energy experts insist that there’s no single, simple solution to this high-stakes challenge. Maintaining reliability will certainly require retaining some otherwise unprofitable fossil-fueled power plants. But it also requires pressing utilities and regional grid operators to rapidly bring solar, wind, and batteries online — and enlisting electricity users to shift power use to reduce costly peaks in demand.
This multifaceted approach would bolster the grid without sacrificing cost and climate concerns. Flocking back to coal and ratcheting up gas, meanwhile, would cost consumers more, increase climate and air pollution, and ultimately result in a less diversified and therefore more fragile grid than one balanced by renewables.
In the longer term, the U.S. must break barriers to building far more high-voltage power lines to connect clean energy across regions and share power when extreme weather strikes, experts say. It also needs to support the economics for “clean firm” technologies like advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal power, or long-duration energy storage systems that can fill the gaps when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
“Reliability is actually a characteristic of the entire electricity system, and individual resources contribute to reliability as part of a balanced portfolio,” Sara Baldwin, senior electrification director at think tank Energy Innovation, said during a March webinar introducing the group’s February report on the complexities of keeping the grid running in a time of energy transition.
“So whenever you hear someone talking about the reliability of a single resource, that should raise a flag that is not necessarily grounded in full truth,” she said.
Baldwin’s “single resource” comment nods to a common refrain from the Trump administration and congressional Republicans that today’s grid reliability problems have a simple solution: Keep burning coal.
Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that authorizes the Department of Energy to prevent uneconomical coal plants from closing, even if they’re violating federal and state carbon and environmental mandates and imposing higher power costs on customers. This would be the most aggressive federal intervention in modern history into the authority of states to regulate utilities, and of regional grid operators to manage competitive energy markets.
Many Republicans in Congress have long insisted that grid reliability problems are primarily caused by climate and clean-energy policies put in place by states and the Biden administration. They argue that regulations, not economics, are forcing coal plants into “premature” retirement and that cleaner alternatives can’t be relied on to fill the gap left by those retirements.
During two grid-reliability hearings last month in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans leveraged this framing in questions for utility executives, grid operators, and energy experts. “Too many electric-generating facilities have been retired in recent years,” said Rep. Bob Latta, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that held the hearings.
Under questioning, most representatives of the U.S. grid operators, which are responsible for managing the systems that deliver electricity to about two-thirds of U.S. customers, concurred with Republicans that the shuttering of coal power plants presents a major reliability challenge.
But Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and ranking member on the energy subcommittee, pushed back on Republicans’ framing. Instead of trying to keep coal plants open, he said, utilities, grid operators, and regulators must clear bottlenecks preventing new clean energy and energy storage from taking over the role that fossil fuels have previously played.
Grid operators are “saying they need every new electricity generator they can get to come online in the next five years,” Pallone said. “If Republicans are really interested in unleashing American energy, they should work with us to clear interconnection queues and let resources get on the grid as quickly as possible.”
Instead, Republicans are considering repealing the clean-energy tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Pallone said in his opening statement. That would undercut the economics of not just solar, wind, and battery projects but of many other forms of carbon-free generation and storage, including geothermal power, advanced nuclear power, and long-duration energy storage.
“Repealing billions of dollars in technology-neutral funding for all types of new energy is not the way you address the increasing need for energy,” he said.
Pallone’s comments underscore two of the biggest problems facing the U.S. grid.
The first is that coal simply cannot compete economically against alternatives. Coal has dwindled to providing only about 15% of U.S. electricity supply, as both fossil gas and renewables fall in cost. Last year, solar, wind, and batteries alone made up more than 90% of the 56 gigawatts of power capacity built in the U.S., and they are expected to lead new additions in 2025, too.
The second problem is that many U.S. utilities and grid operators have been unable to move fast enough to embrace the advantages of cheap, clean energy. As Energy Innovation’s February report highlights, “outdated views on grid reliability are colliding with slow-moving institutions,” which has confounded the potential for solar, wind, and batteries to fill the reliability gaps left by shuttered coal plants.
Much of the reluctance from certain grid operators stems from the fact that solar and wind ebb and flow with the weather, whereas fossil-fueled power plants can be turned on and off on command.
“Renewable generators play an important role, and we want them to come onto the grid, but they are not a one-for-one substitute for the fossil-fuel generators that we are replacing,” said Manu Asthana, president and CEO of PJM Interconnection, which manages the transmission grid delivering electricity to about 65 million people from the mid-Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes.
But daytime solar production and nighttime wind generation can still provide a large and predictable amount of the power needed during hot summer afternoons and evenings and cold winter mornings, when demand for electricity spikes and reliability issues loom, said Wilson Ricks, a researcher and energy-modeling expert at Princeton University’s ZERO Lab.
Meanwhile, lithium-ion batteries are becoming a more cost-effective way to store clean power for use when the grid needs it, he said. Utility-scale batteries deployed in California and Texas are storing gigawatts of solar power to cover peak grid demands during sunset and evening hours, for example.
Taken together, “the technologies that are currently experiencing widespread commercial adoption — wind, solar, lithium-ion batteries — can actually go a long way towards ensuring that system-wide resource accuracy,” Ricks said during last month’s webinar.
Real-world experience bears this out, said Ric O’Connell, founding executive director of GridLab, a think tank that contributed to the Energy Innovation reliability report. The standout example is Texas, which is adding wind, solar, and batteries faster than any other state.
The transmission grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas “has been running at 85% carbon-free for the last several weeks in the spring,” O’Connell said during the webinar. That clean power has helped cover the absence of fossil-fueled plants that were shut down for seasonal maintenance, he noted.
Similarly, Southwest Power Pool, which manages a grid stretching from the Dakotas to Oklahoma, has hit 90% wind power during some hours of the year and has seen nearly half of annual power needs supplied by carbon-free energy in recent years, he said.
Last year, on California’s solar- and battery-rich grid, grid operator CAISO clocked 100 days in a row with 100% carbon-free electricity for at least a part of each day. Gigawatts of battery capacity also improved the state’s summer grid reliability by shifting solar power into the evenings.
That’s a big change from the summers of 2020 and 2022, when the California grid faced serious emergencies, CAISO CEO Elliot Mainzer told Congress during last month’s hearings.
“A reliable grid relies on a portfolio of resources with different attributes and complementary characteristics,” he said. Pairing batteries with solar “has helped to increase reliability in recent years.”
By contrast, O’Connell said, PJM’s grid “is in the single digits for wind and solar. PJM has tons of gas, tons of coal, tons of nuclear — and they say, ‘We need even more to meet growing load.’ I’m like, ‘No, we need to add wind and solar and batteries to meet that growing load.’”
PJM’s grid is a microcosm of this problematic dynamic.
The region expects to lose about 40 gigawatts of generation, more than 20% of its capacity, by 2030. But critics say its bigger challenge is its inability to interconnect new resources to replace what it’s losing.
For years, PJM delayed interconnection reforms conducted by other grid operators. It has also failed until recently to undertake the kind of regional grid expansion plans that have been done by grid operators in Texas, California, and the Midwest, which have enabled them to bring much more clean energy online.
Critics say PJM’s failure to institute these reforms and forward-looking plans has played an outsized role in its struggle to replace retiring power plants and in the spiking cost of securing new generation resources. Multiple studies find PJM could have avoided billions of dollars of costs and significantly eased its reliability concerns if it had connected even a fraction of those pent-up clean energy and battery projects over the past decade.
Instead, state regulators and grid operators have been forced to use costly emergency mechanisms to keep power plants from closing. In Maryland, for example, PJM has used its “reliability must-run” authority to pay the owners of coal- and oil-fired power plants to postpone their retirements until at least 2028 to prevent the threat of regional grid instability or outages, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming years.
The high price tag of these emergency stay-open measures highlights the economic burden of poor planning around power plant retirements, O’Connell said.
Those costs are bound to rise if the Trump administration forces coal power plants to stay open under emergency orders — or even demands that utilities reopen closed coal plants, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said the Trump administration may seek to do.
These poor economics are why backers of renewables are frustrated with those who insist that clean-energy policies are to blame for coal plants closing and thus for grid reliability challenges.
“People are retiring coal plants because they’re uneconomic,” O’Connell said.
Karen Palmer, a senior fellow and director of the electric power program at think tank Resources for the Future, agreed that coal retirements are “not the fault of environmental regulation. The market prices just aren’t there.”
Nor are fossil-fueled power plants as reliable as they’re often made out to be, particularly during weather extremes when the grid needs them the most. Summer heat waves reduce the efficiency of gas-fired power plants and can lead to equipment failures.
And major wintertime grid emergencies of the past several years, such as the Texas grid collapse in February 2021 and rolling outages in the Southeast in December 2022, have been linked to cold-related failures not only at coal and gas-fired power plants but across the wells and pipelines that deliver gas to generate power.
No one technology is immune to weather stresses and disruptions. Subzero temperatures can freeze up wind turbines and sap battery capacity, and scorching temperatures reduce solar-panel output and dampen battery performance. But this reinforces the importance of a portfolio approach to solving reliability challenges, Baldwin said.
None of this is to downplay the complexity that grid operators face — particularly at a time when demand for electricity is growing at a pace not seen in decades.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which manages a grid serving 15 U.S. states from Louisiana to North Dakota, warned last year that its latest expectations for new power demand from data centers and manufacturing facilities put it at increased risk of reliability challenges if generating capacity doesn’t increase at the same rate.
In New York, state grid operator NYISO has identified a “very concerning decline in statewide resource margins” by 2034 unless it can expand clean-energy deployments, which lag behind state targets. NYISO has already delayed the closure of some gas-fired “peaker” power plants in New York City, which lies at the southern end of a grid bottleneck that constrains how much clean power from upstate New York and Canada can reach the city, NYISO CEO Richard Dewey said at the March 25 congressional hearing.
ISO New England, which manages the grid across six New England states, is struggling during winter cold snaps to meet simultaneous demand for gas for heating and for generating power, CEO and President Gordon van Welie said at the hearing. New England is also relying on Canadian hydropower in the near term and offshore wind farms in the longer term, he said — both sources threatened by Trump administration policies.
And while grid operators at last month’s hearing concurred with Republicans that losing existing generation is one reliability threat, they also agreed that losing federal clean-energy tax credits is another. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, asked PJM’s Asthana if losing Inflation Reduction Act funding would “help or hurt our ability to stabilize the grid and to increase production.”
“In the near term, the interconnection queue is full of a lot of renewable projects, many of whom are, I’m sure, counting on the IRA,” Asthana replied. Repealing those tax credits “would make it less likely for them to come — and we do need them to come.”
“Anybody disagree with that on this panel?” DeGette asked the other grid operators. “No? They’re all shaking their heads no.”
An anticipated data-center boom is driving utility plans for massive natural gas investments in southeastern Wisconsin, raising objections from customer and climate advocates.
Critics say they’ve seen big development plans fail to pan out before, and they don’t want to be stuck paying for overbuilt fossil-fuel generation based on increasingly uncertain growth projections.
Wisconsin Electric Power Co. (WEPCO) says it needs to build new gas generation to power a planned $3.3 billion Microsoft data center near Mount Pleasant. The project is on the site of the failed Foxconn LCD screen factory, a proposed megaproject that President Donald Trump promised during his first term would become “the eighth wonder of the world” but that never materialized as planned.
“There’s a lot of healthy skepticism because of the Foxconn project never reaching anywhere near the scale that was being touted,” said Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board. “People are asking, ‘Is this real this time?’”
Microsoft has already paused construction on the data center as it reevaluates the scope and how “recent changes in technology” may affect the project. A Chinese artificial-intelligence company in January announced a major breakthrough that it claims allows it to offer AI services with far less computing power, upending global assumptions about the industry’s electricity demand.
Microsoft is also proposing a data center in nearby Kenosha, and a developer called Cloverleaf Infrastructure is proposing one in nearby Port Washington. But the specifics of these data centers and their energy demand are not confirmed, hence critics say the utility hasn’t demonstrated that demand will increase enough to justify the roughly $2 billion in natural gas investments proposed by We Energies (WEPCO’s trade name). Critics also note that an influx of natural gas power seems to contradict Microsoft’s own climate goals of being carbon-negative by 2030.
“We Energies says they want to be ready for other potential customers but has provided no proof of who those customers are or what they want in terms of their energy sourcing,” said Gloria Randall-Hewitt, a resident who spoke at a March 25 hearing held by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. These projects “carry huge price tags in terms of pollution, detrimental health outcomes, and rate increases for customers. They are asking us to just trust them.”
We Energies is looking to build a new five-turbine, 1,100-megawatt gas plant in Oak Creek on the same site as two large coal plants, one of which is closing this year. We Energies also plans to build a 128-MW gas plant in Paris, Wisconsin, 25 miles south of Oak Creek. The utility proposes serving the plants with a new liquefied natural gas storage terminal at the Oak Creek plant site, by Lake Michigan’s shore, and with a new 33-mile pipeline.
The Oak Creek gas plant would go online in 2027 or 2028, the utility says, and cost around $1.3 billion. The Paris plant, made up of seven reciprocating internal combustion engines, could go online next year, at a cost of roughly $300 million. WEPCO needs the storage terminal, which will cost about $520 million, to make sure the plants and residential customers have enough gas, as well as to meet requirements established by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which manages the region’s grid, utility spokesperson Brendan Conway said by email. The new pipeline would cost about $210 million.
The three-member Public Service Commission will decide whether to grant the utility the right to recoup those costs — and a profit — from ratepayers. After overwhelming turnout at the public hearing on Oak Creek, the commission extended the public comment period for the proposed plant through April 7. That was also the deadline for comments on the storage terminal, and the commission completed a comment period for the Paris proposal earlier this winter.
In an April 1 filing before the commission, We Energies said it forecasts 1,800 MW of increased demand in the next five years, and even if only 450 MW of that demand materializes, building the gas plants is the most cost effective way to meet it. Conway said the Oak Creek gas plant would save ratepayers $413 million compared to other alternatives.
But advocates don’t believe that and hope the commission orders the utility to consider other options and do more study.
“We understand there needs to be increased energy production to meet that load, but we want to make sure it’s the most cost-competitive suite of options, not just defaulting back to natural gas as a baseline,” said Emma Heins, principal at Advanced Energy United, an industry association representing transmission, generation, and transportation-related companies.
The Citizens Utility Board, Advanced Energy United, and other experts say the situation highlights Wisconsin’s lack of an integrated resource plan. Most states require utilities to undergo these comprehensive planning processes to meet predicted energy demand, but Wisconsin utilities simply bring proposals to regulators on a case-by-case basis. Advocates say centralized planning would avoid unnecessary generation investments and facilitate more investment in renewables.
“There’s a larger governance issue” in how decisions around energy infrastructure are made, said Courtney Brady, deputy director for the Midwest region at Evergreen Action, a nonprofit policy advocacy group. “That speaks to the fact that without an integrated resource plan in Wisconsin, you’re going to be more subject to these big proposals that could end up being costly unused infrastructure. I don’t think WEPCO has done their job in understanding the alternatives that exist, partly because they are not required by law to do so.”
We Energies currently gets only 5% of its energy from renewables, with 28% from coal and 37% from natural gas. Its investment in renewables lags behind other Wisconsin utilities like Xcel Energy, which generates half its energy carbon-free, and Madison Gas and Electric, which plans to be carbon neutral by 2050 and supplies the city of Madison with 24% renewable energy.
Conway said We Energies is investing over $9 billion in new renewable energy by 2029 and will eliminate coal-fired power by 2032. He said demand-response programs and renewables would still not be enough to meet the expected new demand.
“Now more than ever — it is critical for us to have quick-start gas plants available and running when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine,” he said by email.
Heins noted that WEPCO was “one of the last utilities in the country to build a large-scale coal plant.” In 2011, it spent $2.3 billion on a new coal plant at the Oak Creek site; the utility now plans to convert that plant to natural gas “in the coming years,” Conway said. Around the same time it built that coal plant, WEPCO invested close to $1 billion in pollution controls for another Oak Creek coal plant that is closing this year, leaving ratepayers with $645 million in stranded costs, as noted in an analysis by think tank RMI.
“This utility has a history of being behind the times on technologies,” Heins said. “Our sentiment is a lot of energy options are being left on the table, technologies that can be implemented much faster than a natural gas plant.”
RMI’s analysis notes that under the utility’s proposal, customers will on average pay an extra $78 a year to finance the Oak Creek gas plant, but that amount could climb to $136 a year if fuel and equipment cost increases considered possible by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory come to pass. RMI and other experts note that U.S. plans to build more LNG terminals to facilitate exports also mean that gas prices will likely rise and become more volatile, to the detriment of U.S. ratepayers.
Conway noted that WEPCO filed a March 31 request with the Public Service Commission to approve a rate structure where data centers would pay for generation infrastructure planned to meet their needs. Content said the proposal is a step in the right direction but lamented that the gas projects could be approved long before there is any certainty about the new rate plan.
Residents testifying at the Oak Creek public hearing also expressed fears about the health impacts of new gas generation, especially since they have already spent years suffering air pollution from the nearby coal plants.
The closure of those coal plants is a victory for public health and the environment — one that would be undermined by the construction of unnecessary, polluting gas plants, said Abby Novinska-Lois, executive director of Healthy Climate Wisconsin, an advocacy group led by medical professionals
“This isn’t a transition,” she said. “This is a brand new health threat to the area that isn’t necessary when we have energy efficiency and clean energy alternatives that can also meet the demand.”
For the first time, fossil fuels accounted for less than half of U.S. electricity production across an entire month as clean power generation surged in March.
Last month, fossil gas and coal made up just over 49% of power generation, while solar, wind, hydropower, biofuels and other renewables, and nuclear met 51% of demand, new data from think tank Ember shows.
The data point is a striking example of how far the U.S. energy transition has come in recent years.
A decade ago, the U.S. got nearly two-thirds of its power from fossil fuels. But after years of building mostly solar, wind, and batteries, the country has started to close that gap. Just last month solar and wind generation jumped by 37% and 12% respectively, compared to March 2024. Meanwhile, fossil-fuel generation fell by 2.5%.
It’s worth noting that this happened at the start of the spring “shoulder season,” which runs from March to May in the U.S. and is a sort of stars-aligning time for clean energy performance.
There are a few reasons why. Milder temperatures mean people use less energy to heat and cool their homes, so power demand tends to contract. That has historically made shoulder seasons — the fall version runs from September to November — a good time to take fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants offline for maintenance. Meanwhile, wind production peaks in the spring, and solar production comes more alive with the longer days of stronger sun. Last month, solar and wind alone met over 24% of overall U.S. power demand.
But still: The shoulder seasons are always a stars-aligning time for clean energy. They were last year and the year before that and the one before that, too. Yet in the U.S., clean energy has never before beaten out fossil fuels for a whole month, no matter the season. That’s what makes this a significant moment.
It’s also notable given the current political hostility toward clean energy in the U.S. — and the federal government’s re-embrace of fossil fuels.
President Donald Trump wants to halt all wind turbine construction. Congressional Republicans are considering cutting Inflation Reduction Act tax credits that incentivize clean energy projects. Trump’s aggressive tariffs on China, which remain in place even after he paused “reciprocal” levies on every other country, could drastically slow the battery storage boom. And the president just this week signed a clutch of executive orders aimed at boosting coal, a highly polluting energy source that also happens to be in structural decline because it cannot compete with fossil gas or renewables on cost.
Even in spite of those headwinds, renewables continue to soar to new heights, underscoring the fact that clean energy is no longer a marginal part of the U.S. power system — but a cornerstone that is here to stay.
After eight years of planning and amid the Trump administration’s all-out assault on the sector, an offshore wind project outside of New York City quietly began at-sea construction this month.
Developer Equinor issued no press releases, held no ceremonies, and failed to respond to multiple inquiries about the construction milestone for its Empire Wind 1 project. Instead, a Listserv catering to boat captains and local residents posted a March 24 notice that “rock installation” around the turbines’ underwater bases would begin in April. Multiple insiders told Canary Media that work is now underway on those bases, which will minimize erosion around the first-ever wind turbines to connect to New York City’s power grid.
The lack of fanfare around an 810-megawatt wind farm effectively breaking ground less than 20 miles from America’s largest city speaks to the seismic shifts in messaging by renewable energy companies under Trump 2.0. While some firms are testing new lobbying strategies, others are choosing silence.
“There’s a bit of hesitancy to be out in front,” said Hillary Bright, executive director of Turn Forward, a nonprofit that advocates for U.S. offshore-wind businesses and sector growth. “It’s about not wanting to stick their heads up and drawing more attention, potentially, from the administration, which is already giving quite a bit of attention to offshore wind.”
President Donald Trump, more accurately, has put a bullseye on the industry’s back.
The president has called wind power “garbage,” “horrendous,” and “bullshit.” On the campaign trail, he made “windmills” a frequent focus of stump speeches and social media tirades. In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, Trump said “no new windmills” would be built in the U.S. during his presidency. Days later he reposted a video on Truth Social that contained misleading information about the scale of environmental damage from last year’s wind turbine failure at the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts.
Trump then issued an executive order on Inauguration Day that effectively froze all offshore wind permitting and leasing pending a federal review. Seemingly safe from the president’s pause at the time were nine projects, including Empire Wind 1, that already had their federal permits in hand. Since then, at least one of those permitted projects — the 2.8-gigawatt Atlantic Shores project off the New Jersey coast — has fallen apart. Others, like Dominion Energy’s 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, have pressed on.
With rock installation underway, Empire Wind has taken the first step toward erecting the project’s 54 turbines. On Monday, Equinor sent out another construction “update” email, this time about round-the-clock “[remotely operated vehicle] and dive operations” in the lease area this April, meaning underwater robots and human divers are also at work.
Both at-sea construction notices went out to subscribers of a public Listserv and have since been posted to the project’s “Community Updates” webpage. But Equinor, a Norwegian energy giant, did not update Empire Wind’s homepage to tout the news. Its Facebook page is now deactivated. The project’s X account made its most recent post in November. Equinor has not issued a single press release about Empire Wind 1 since Trump took office.
Empire Wind 1 is slated to finish construction by 2027, and when it does it will power 500,000 New York homes, according to the project’s website. It will also play an integral role in helping the state achieve its legislatively mandated target of 70% renewable energy by 2030.
But Bright said she isn’t surprised that the company is avoiding the spotlight right now.
An army of conservative think tanks are lobbying for a stop-work order on all U.S. offshore wind under construction, citing debunked claims that wind farms harm whales.
Empire Wind’s quiet kickoff this month caught the attention of U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and longtime offshore wind opponent. In late March he penned a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in response to the “alarming development” of the project’s at-sea work and advised Burgum to “block construction” of Empire Wind using “everything in your power.” Smith cited the president’s anti-wind memorandum alongside other claims, which lacked specifics, that Empire Wind could “blind” military radar or break apart during hurricanes.
Smith also claimed in his letter to Burgum that something similar to last year’s cargo ship collision with the Francis Scott Key Bridge could happen to one of Empire Wind’s turbines, writing “such a situation is more likely than many may think.” The fatal bridge collision occurred inside one of the Port of Baltimore’s designated shipping channels. While Empire Wind’s lease area is sandwiched between two shipping lanes, early concerns about ship collisions in the New York Bight were dismissed after years of independent studies, government research, and computer simulations.
There’s no indication that the Interior Department has intervened in Empire Wind’s scheduled construction — yet.
In fact, agency officials are likely in close contact with Empire Wind’s developers, as is typical with all construction in federal waters. If Empire Wind 1 can avoid weather delays and political interference, the first steel monopile — the subsea part of a wind tower — could be driven into the seafloor as early as May. Undersea cable laying is scheduled for June, according to sources familiar with the project.
Plus, with rising energy demands and some of these multi-billion-dollar wind projects nearly complete, some Republicans see abandonment as a risky move.
While the start of offshore work is a symbolic milestone, Empire Wind’s onshore construction is also ramping up.
Empire Wind’s Monday update email said the roof of the project’s South Brooklyn Marine Terminal facility is nearing completion. According to the notice, excavation is underway at the spot where a future Brooklyn-based substation will connect wind-generated electricity to the city’s grid.
Research to monitor ecosystem impacts from this massive project is also progressing.
In late March, Duke University professor Doug Nowacek told Canary Media that he and his team of researchers were still planning to tag whales in the project’s lease area during the last week of April. The tagging is meant to take place just before pile-driving into the seafloor begins in early May, he explained.
“This is a unique opportunity to gather data on whale movements in the area both before and after a wind project is built,” said Nowacek, whose multi-year research on the effects of wind projects on marine animals is funded by a Department of Energy grant. As of late March, Nowacek said that research was going forward despite headwinds in Washington.
Meanwhile, as the weather warms, marking the start of a new construction season, “things are moving forward” for the four other U.S. offshore wind projects that are underway, said Bright of Turn Forward.
In addition to Empire Wind, the other commercial-scale projects actively under construction are Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Massachusetts’ Vineyard Wind 1, New York’s Sunrise Wind, and Revolution Wind, which is shared between Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The steady progress of some wind projects under Trump’s anti-wind order is noteworthy but not entirely unexpected.
Presidential executive orders are not “self-executing,” according to Mark Squillace, a law professor at the University of Colorado Law School. Squillace said they are akin to a memo penned to another leader, which in this case is the Secretary of the Interior.
Before entering Trump’s orbit, Secretary Burgum was a friend to wind energy as governor of North Dakota, a state that gets more than one-third of its power from onshore wind. He indicated at his Senate confirmation hearing in January that he would allow fully permitted offshore wind projects “to continue” even under political pressure to halt them.
Since his confirmation, Burgum has made negative comments about offshore wind — calling it “expensive” and “unreliable” on the social media site X — but he’s not yet moved to pull the plug on large-scale energy projects in the middle of construction. Burgum is also operating against the backdrop of an unprecedented surge in power demand, in large part from data centers. Construction of new gas plants can’t keep up; the U.S. needs all the power it can get.
In countries like the U.K., offshore wind is already increasing grid reliability while delivering affordable energy.
In fact, while Equinor keeps its head down in America, the company is celebrating ongoing successes in Britain’s offshore wind sector, which the U.K. government calls “the backbone” of its clean power system. Equinor already runs three of Britain’s operational offshore projects and is one of four developers currently building Dogger Bank, the 277-turbine North Sea project that will soon surpass Orsted’s Hornsea 2 as the world’s largest wind farm.
Base Power, the Texas startup designing and installing very large home batteries for close to free, just pulled in an additional $200 million to fund its growth.
Silicon Valley heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz co-led the Series B with Addition, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Valor Equity Partners. They were joined by previous investors including Thrive Capital, Altimeter, Terrain, and Trust Ventures.
“It will fuel the next phase of growth,” Base Power co-founder and CEO Zach Dell told Canary Media. Besides ramping up installations in the company’s home market of Texas, that growth will include breaking ground on a domestic factory to manufacture home battery systems and busting out of Texas to sell in other states.
The sizable investment delivers a major vote of confidence in Base Power’s approach to a market that’s been tough for American companies to crack in a scalable way: connected, distributed energy. Base Power equips households with batteries for backup during outages, as long as they agree to buy power from the company and let it dispatch the batteries into Texas’ competitive energy markets managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. When all the pieces come together, this model gives homeowners cheaper, more reliable power while making the overall electricity system more cost-effective and stable, not to mention cleaner.
It’s a beloved concept in clean energy circles, promising to decarbonize the grid while skipping the delays and expenses associated with upgrading the macro electricity system. But the distributed-energy vision for batteries hasn’t minted many standout successes for venture investors.
Each of the 50 states regulates the power sector differently. In some states, like Texas, companies can aggregate small-scale batteries and earn money by bidding them into power markets; other states require such activities to run through a monopoly utility, which may or may not be interested in disrupting its own business. Base Power will need to adapt its strategy to grow steadily nationwide, but the company is already testing a new structure for working with legacy utilities.
It’s a turbulent time for cleantech investment generally, but Base Power raised its new financing from a group of VCs that aren’t primarily focused on climate or clean energy as a vertical. Dell and co. made that happen by showing rapid customer adoption.
“Often you see projections change, and they’ve been very consistent about doing what they say they’re going to do,” said Willem Van Lancker, partner at early-stage investment firm Terrain. Terrain made its first investment in Base Power’s seed round and is one of several previous investors who doubled down in the latest round. “The people that have been along for the journey since the beginning have witnessed the execution,” he added.
Base Power incorporated in June 2023 and launched its commercial product in May 2024. Since then, Dell said, the staff has grown to 100 people serving thousands of customers and earning millions of dollars in revenue. In-house teams are installing 20 home battery systems per day, which added up to 10 megawatt-hours installed just last month, a number Dell expects to exceed in April.
A typical customer gets either 25 or 50 kilowatt-hours of storage installed for just a few hundred dollars up-front and a minimum three-year commitment to buy retail power from Base. Those are significantly bigger batteries than the norm for residential storage.
Between the large battery design and the rapid pace of customer-driven installations, this decentralized battery fleet is starting to add up. Indeed, Dell expects to hit 100 megawatt-hours installed by mid-summer, equivalent to one of the larger utility-scale batteries operating in ERCOT. (Some go up to a few hundred megawatt-hours.)
But even in regulation-light Texas, grid-scale batteries take several years to develop, permit, and install, whereas efficient home batteries can reach customers in a matter of weeks. By this summer, Dell said Base Power will be installing more megawatt-hours per month in ERCOT than any other developer of large or small batteries, though he did not share a specific target rate.
This is, admittedly, a tricky metric to standardize across scales of battery project. For comparison, utility-scale developer esVolta is bringing 980 megawatt-hours online this year in Texas across three projects. But factoring in time spent on permits, land acquisition, and interconnection queues lowers the effective rate of megawatt-hours added per month of effort on those projects.
Just a few years ago, $200 million would have been a record size for an equity round in the stationary-energy-storage sector. In 2019, for instance, unorthodox Energy Vault, which proposed storing power by stacking blocks with towering six-armed cranes, pulled in $110 million for its Series B, the largest such investment in a grid-storage venture at the time.
Others have surpassed that since then, like Form Energy’s $450 million Series E for a novel iron-based battery. But those investments went to large-scale storage technology plays, not small-scale, aggregated storage models, which typically draw more modest sums from wonky climatetech specialists.
Dell declined to dwell too much on the robust quantity of new cash in hand.
“Fundraising is the ability to keep executing,” Dell said. “The things we should celebrate are customers and revenue and products.”
Base Power will use some of its new funds to accelerate development of its own battery factory in Texas, Dell noted. The company is now searching for a site, with a focus on the Austin area, and could break ground by the end of the year.
Currently, Base Power uses contract manufacturers to turn its residential battery designs into a physical product; some but not all of the system is assembled in China.
That makes Base Power’s supply chain vulnerable to President Donald Trump’s barrage of new tariffs, which raise the cost of imports from longstanding trading partners and geopolitical adversaries alike. The storage industry is still figuring out the damage from these tariffs; even domestic battery-cell production depends on imports for precursor materials, but some critical minerals are exempt from the latest tariffs.
Dell said that the push for domestic manufacturing was always part of the plan, though, given Base Power’s commitment to “compounding cost advantage through vertical integration.”
“Doing it ourselves we can take more cost out of the system,” Dell explained. He envisions the factory producing thousands of units per week.
Then there’s the matter of geographical expansion.
“They can build a very, very large business just inside Texas,” Van Lancker said. “That being said, the plans will allow them to expand outside of Texas.”
Base Power will need to work with utilities to operate in areas that lack the retail choice and open competitive markets that Texas enjoys. Where appropriate, Base will partner with regulated utilities and sell them “capacity as a service.” In other words, Base Power would install its batteries in homes, but instead of playing the markets itself with that capacity, the startup can hand the keys to a utility to help meet growing demand for power at peak hours, or other grid needs.
The startup rolled out this model in March with Bandera Electric Cooperative, a 29,000-member utility in Texas Hill Country. (A fraction of Texans still get their power from vertically integrated cooperative or municipal utilities.) Bandera Electric offers its customer-owners this backup power for a monthly subscription with no up-front cost; the cooperative dispatches the batteries based on its own strategy — and pays Base Power for that ability.
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